Blackshard is the sort of game that wakes you up in a strange place surrounded by bones. You wander through a surreal maze filled with impossible architecture, forgotten gods and enough unanswered questions to keep a pub quiz team occupied for several years. Unfortunately, mystery only remains fascinating for so long before it becomes the gaming equivalent of someone refusing to explain why they’re standing in your garden.
Gaming Heaven
There is genuine beauty here. The enormous structures, strange landscapes and dreamlike environments create an impressive atmosphere, while the soundtrack adds an eerie, hypnotic quality. Activating strange altars and discovering hidden areas occasionally produces moments of proper intrigue.
The world also encourages exploration rather than dragging you around by the nose. There are multiple endings, environmental changes and strange discoveries waiting for anyone patient enough to keep wandering. The problem is that patience becomes the primary gameplay mechanic.
Gaming Hell
Calling Blackshard a walking simulator is being generous to walking. You stroll, jump, interact with the occasional object and try not to fall into the abyss, which happens often enough to suggest your character has absolutely no spatial awareness.
The narrative is deliberately obscure, but there is a difference between intriguing ambiguity and simply having no idea what on earth is happening. Large stretches involve wandering around enormous environments looking for something that might or might not exist. Sometimes you discover something fascinating. Sometimes you discover another corridor.
The lack of meaningful objectives will lose plenty of players, particularly when the game offers little mechanical variety to compensate. The five endings provide some incentive to return, but replaying hours of deliberately confusing wandering isn’t everyone’s idea of entertainment.
Final Judgement
Blackshard is visually striking and occasionally haunting, but underneath the atmosphere is an extremely thin gameplay experience. It mistakes obscurity for depth and wandering for progression. If you enjoy existential questions, mysterious architecture and being spectacularly lost, you’ll probably feel at home. Everyone else might reasonably ask for directions.
